Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 211

The parent-child dyad data (chapter 5) allows us to look inside individual
pairs of children and their caregivers to more precisely track the degree to which
children reflect, or deviate from, their parents’ own variable case marking pat-
terns. The main result is that individual children do not replicate the pattern of
variable case marking that their individual caregiver uses. Parents uniformly pro-
duce more “traditional” case marking than children do, across ages. I take this to
be an indicator of how much children are inclined toward regular rules, so, a form
of regularization. It’s an interesting type of regularization, however, because
most subjects are nominative, so it is based on a specific combination of syntactic
and thematic roles. Moreover, the experiments in chapters 2 and 3 showed that
although children interpreted dative subjects as experiencers, in the production
direction this pairing was not as robust. Nevertheless, both children and parents
are alike in producing/accepting dative with 3rd person singular subjects more
than 1st person singular subjects (this is known as the Person-Specific Retention
effect). Also, there is more acceptance of Dative Substitution for subjects that
exhibit nominative-accusative syncretism, and this is shown for both children
and adults but clearly increases as children age. Taken together, these results
underscore the need for investigating patterns of both language acquisition and
variation in the input at a very fine-grained level.
The final section of this chapter then applies a version of Yang’s (2002)
Variational Learning Model to develop a model that allows for stochastic excep-
tions in case marking, in particular for subjects of verbs like langa ‘want’, whose
subject is often accusative (as an exception) rather than dative (as it would be
from a productive rule mapping experiencer subjects to dative) or nominative
(default subject case). I thought this was an interesting application of the Variational
Model.
There are a number of directions in which this research could be productively
developed in the future. One such direction is mentioned in the conclusion chap-
ter: the attempt to link the Tolerance Principle to an evolutionary adaptation. I
found this to be an intriguing question, and one that will enrich studies of lan-
guage acquisition if we can understand where the Tolerance Principle comes
from. Another direction would be to more closely examine the role of animacy
in the subject and object arguments in children’s learning of both verb meanings
and the mapping between case morphology and thematic roles. This was exam-
ined in the corpus data, but it was not specifically manipulated in the experi-
ments. It would be interesting to see whether manipulating animacy of subjects
and objects would interact with case in influencing children’s interpretations of
existing or novel verbs. Based on what we know about children’s use of NP ani-
macy in representing argument structure, namely preferring to associate animate
NPs with the subject argument and inanimate NPs with non-subjects or derived
subjects (Becker 2014), we might expect animate objects and inanimate subjects
to display different case marking patterns from their more canonical counter-
parts. Finally, this work led me to wonder about the role of word order in learn-
Review and commentary on Nowenstein’s dissertation 211